2010: QRIO Kills Owner Over DRM Violation

INFO SCIENCE: Gizmodo -- usually my second favorite gadget site -- published a puzzlingly st00pid article about the future of eBooks, 500 Books In Your Gadget Bag. Here's a sample of the article's idiocy, "If publishers stop wanting DRM, it's the end of popular creative arts. Not as we know them, but period."



Excuse me? You're saying that art -- often considered as old as humanity itself -- is going to disappear from the face of the Earth unless Sony (aka: The Great Protector of ART!) nukes your new Librie non-book after your right-to-read license expires? Give me a fawking break, you nut job.







Thank God, before I started pulling someone's hair since I can't make a coherent argument, author Cory Doctorow came to the rescue to point out the flaws in Sanford May's article. (In a related note, I love Mr. Doctorow. Have I mentioned that recently? Hmmm, yes I have.)

But the author goes further and asserts that without DRM, there will be no market for entertainment product ever again ("If publishers stop wanting DRM, it's the end of popular creative arts. Not as we know them, but period.") despite the fact that the software industry got bigger when it abandoned DRM, and despite the fact that no new medium has ever succeeded by appealing to the virtues of the medium before it (there're very few ideas more goofy than the idea that people will start buying ebooks just as soon as they have fewer features and more restrictions, provided that the ebooks can be played back on special-purpose devices with sharp screens). He cites Sony as proof of this ("Sony may be nuts, but they're not that nuts."), despite the fact that Sony was forced out of the walkman market by its failure to deliver the DRM-free devices that its customers demanded. Yes, Sony is that nuts.



He doesn't even touch on the marketplace experience of every published writer who's tried giving away DRM-free ebooks -- me, Lessig, Jim Munroe, the Baen authors, Orson Scott Card -- universally, the experience is that we sell more books.



[...]



Really, it's as though he sat down and called an ebook startup's PR guy, then reasoned out all of his conclusions a priori, without reference to any of the activity in the field.

I know what you're thinking! How can a reasonably well known author like Cory not appreciate Sony: The Great Protector of ART's interest in DRM?!? I'm shocked, SHOCKED! Well, maybe, just maybe, Sony doesn't have anyone's best interest in mind except for their own bottom line.



(Read the original Gizmodo article and Cory's BoingBoing response)

Game Boy Flash-Memory Cartridge

INFO TECHNOLOGY: I've been thinking about it for a while, but I've finally decided to buy a flash-memory cartridge and link cable for the awesome retro Game Boy Advance my awesome retro boyfriend bought me.







In short, these little devices allow you to put your own software on your Game Boy Advance. The setup is pretty simple. You need a cable to connect your Game Boy Advance to your computer, and a flash-memory cartridge. (I think that's what the above graphic is trying to say. Software + Link Cable + Flash Memory Card = Japanese Lady Happy Time.) They can be used to play ill-gotten games, but Game Boy games are pretty reasonably priced, so that's not my intent. (Make no mistake however, I am still a dirty, dirty pirate.) I just want to play around with modding and old game boy games that aren't easy to procure nowadays.



What surprised me about all this is that you can now get flash-memory cartridges up to 1 Gig! That will hold a whole lot of early Game Boy games. In fact, it should hold them all.



(Image via GBA Roms)

Visualizing Populations

INFO VISUALIZATION: I found this visualization in the Times showing the difference between the topology of large cities in the States and China.







The point is well taken: China has a whole lot of new big cities.



However, I wonder if the representation of the U.S. is skewed due to the erratic nature of city, county, and state boundaries here. Yes, there are only 9 cities with a population of 1 million or more, but if you look at urban areas without regard to arbitrary political boundaries, the census reports 37 U.S. "cities" with populations larger then a million. That's four times the number represented in this graph. It can make a huge difference when you look at the whole picture. For example, New York's urban population doubles from around 8 million to just under 18 million (or 21 million according to this source) when you look at natural rather then political boundaries.



This visualization also gives the impression that there are 10 or so New York sized cities in China. That's a little too amazing to sound true. Here again if we look at cities without regard to political boundaries, the three largest urban areas are in North America:

1 New York (NY) 21,199,000

2 Mexico City 20,267,000

3 Los Angeles (CA) 16,373,000

In fact China doesn't even come into play until rank 17.

16 Istanbul 8,506,000

17 Shanghai 8,214,000

18 Washington (DC) 7,608,000

So, interesting as it is, the graph is a bit skewed in its representation. It would be very interesting to see this sort of display using a city's natural boundaries.

Overshadowed.com

VISUAL COMMUNICATION: Just ran across some amazing photos at Overshadowed.







Neat.

Online Game Exchange Rates

INFO TECHNOLOGY: Could Play Vault be the beginning of a currency exchange market for massive multiplayer online games?

How it works

Once you find a Partner game you like, PlayVault fetches your old game currency so our Partner game can provide you with the proper amount of currency on your new game.



What's different

1) Our Partner games set the rates you will receive currency at, add it to the game, and deliver it to you

2) It's free. We support the service with referral fees from Partner games

3) There’s no buying, selling, auctioning, markets or anything like that - We are strictly a migration platform



The Catch

To retrieve your currency you have to sign up to a Partner game using the links on our pages. The PlayVault service is free.

Supposedly, this is being supported by game providers to reduce the barriers of entry to new games from old games.



(The logic being: If you have 800 hours logged on Game A, it can be hard to give it up and start over on Game B. However, if you could transfer your Level 2000 ÜberMage's cash to a new game, you're more likely to try something new.)



However, this is in no way a free market; the exchange rates are imposed by the gaming services themselves.



(Via Terra Nova)

From Bad Form to Good Form

INFO SCIENCE: Lift has posted guidelines for creating a good form. It's a good list of tips for those that can't hire a professional.

Published research and statistics state that a forms [sic] completion time and error rate can be greatly reduced by good design, editorial and consideration of usability. This therefore results in enhancing a customer’s experience of an organisations [sic] brand, encouraging retention and building on reputation.

Yes, there are worse evils in the world then unruly forms. But if you're going to bother your users with a lengthy form, do your best to make it usable.

New York Times' Interactive Election Guide

INFO VISUALIZATION: If there's an organization that knows how to use Flash effectively, it's the New York Times. They've recently posted an interactive Election Guide using Flash, and I must say it's a wonderful tool with extensive information that's easy and interesting to explore.











I especially like the combination of the electoral college map with the geographical map. It's a system that's not easy to understand (*cough* *cough* and should be abolished) and this visualization does a goob job of showing how those votes are mapped to the states.

KITT Kills

INTERFACES: A dedicated Finn named Juha Terho has recreated KITT's dashboard from Knight Rider.







He did an awesome job! However, I'm afriad that if I had a car with this interface, I would kill a few dozen people in the average week. We may be in the 80s' future, but thank god we have better interfaces to our cars.



On a side note to my new favorite Finn...

© 2002, 2004 Juha Terho – Redistribution prohibited without express prior consent from the author

Can you recreate someone else's artwork that is protected by copyright and then claim copyright yourself? I'm afriad not. If I redraw a picture of Mickey Mouse, I would get sued if I tried to claim ownership of that image. (In other words, I couldn't sell my drawing of Mickey to a company that will use it sell porn to kids.) But good try nonetheless.



UPDATE: While we're on talking cars, I ran across this article on talking cars in the BBC. Short and interesting read.

Roberto Sicconi, IBM: "There are speech recognition systems deployed in cars today. They have a certain amount of limitations. Most of them require the user to learn and use a set of commands, and not say anything else. This is one of the complaints we are getting from our early customers. They would like to be able to say things freely without having to look into a manual first. So we are developing a system that allows for free entry for commands and requests, requests for help or services that are available in the car. The system has the ability to respond freely back to the users, so that we establish a real two-way communication with the driver."

UPDATE: Juha Terho wrote me to clarify that his copyright is legit and can be held up in court. Since he's a law student (and a very polite individual), I can't help but agree with him. :-) This is good news because too often copyright law is used to stifle creative works built from other material covered by copyright (for example, music made using samples from other songs). So I'm glad to hear that Juha has creative control over his artwork. I've also updated the link to his artwork to this permanent link.

"Plog™": Worse Than "Moblog"

INFO TECHNOLOGY: I tend to like Amazon, however this Plog™ (don't forget the trademark!) business is more than a little silly.

The Plog™ Service is a personalized blog.



Your Amazon.com Plog is a diary of events that will enhance your shopping experience, helping you discover products that have just been released, track changes to your orders, and many other things. Just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. When we think we have something interesting or important to tell you, we'll post it to your Plog.

So, how is this more like a blog then a computer telling me to buy something (formerly known as: recommendations)? Oh yeah, it isn't. Looks like Amazon isn't doing anything new, but just decided to try to get a little mileage off of the blog phenomenon.



It's also pretty sly of them to find a non-word that sounds just like a real word and protect it as a trademark. This is why we never see new products called "Mustang" or "Greyhound" or "General Electric" anymore. No company can own those words. Instead we have "Cingular" and "Celebrex" and "Google" (a mis-spelling of googol) and now, "Plog." These are words a company can own and control. So, forget about that blog you wanted to start called plog, the word has been removed from the public's lexicon.

The History of Programming Languages

INFO VISUALIZATION: Here's a cool visualization I hadn't seen before. The History of Programming Languages by O'Reilly.







The presentation is interesting, however I wouldn't have put the greyed-out images of the animals behind the timeline. They tend to conflict with the greyed-out arrows that show a language's heredity. However, I do like to connection the images (not-so-subtly) imply between the ideas of evolution and programming language development.

The poster is available online in PDF format. You can also find full-size copies at Team O'Reilly Bookstores and upcoming O'Reilly conferences, such as the Open Source Convention in Portland this July. Finally, while supplies last, U.S. residents can get a copy of the "History of Programming Languages" poster when purchasing two books through oreilly.com. (View the full book list.) Use discount code OPC79 in the shopping cart. The poster will be shipped separately from your book order.